Excerpts

Below you will find short excerpts from each of the first three chapters of Festival Legends, Songs and Stories. The book is currently available. Click the link on the right to order a copy today.

CHAPTER 1: TOMMY MAKEM

Tommy reluctantly gave up performing the bagpipes as part of the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem, when the group came to realize that because of the loud sound of the warpipes, playing them indoors at a show knocked the band members out of tune for the following songs. But not too long after that, for very different reasons, Tommy had to give up the bagpipes for good.

“I can play a tune or two on the uileann pipes, but when I came to this country first, I had my hand crushed, my left hand, the fingers won’t, they’d be all right for a minute or two but then would begin to slip and they would slide off the holes because they [the holes] were wider apart [on the uileann pipes] than on the tin whistle.

“I was working here in New Hampshire in a foundry [1956] trying to earn a few dollars so I wouldn’t starve to death when I went to New York to become an actor. The side of a printing press slipped as it was unchained. I was turning it over onto two horses (wooden horses). I put my hand to it to balance it so it wouldn’t [fall over] but it slipped and came down and bounced on a cement floor, my left hand under it. So I tore the tendons out of three fingers [severed the tendons connecting the fingers to the palm].

“And that night, there were three or four doctors there looking at it. A couple of them thought they should probably cut the fingers off. I was only over from Ireland a couple of months. There was one young doctor who was just out of medical school, and his forte was tendons.

“The young fella said, ‘That’s rather drastic, why don’t you let me see if I can save the fingers.’ So the other doctors said, ‘Sure, if you think you can do anything.’

“He took me, and I had seven or eight surgeries on my hand. He took tendons out of my wrist and out of my feet, and he transplanted them into my fingers. That’s why I still have fingers on my left hand.

“[At the time], it wasn’t sore because the weight of this hanging form, bouncing on the floor, it sort of numbed my hand and so I didn’t feel any pain. Matter of fact, they wanted to send me up to the hospital but I went home and I took a bath. It was filthy dirty working in the foundry. I took a bath and then went to the hospital.

“So the pain wasn’t great. But the young doctor who did it, his father had come over from Greece and was a cobbler in the town of Dover, here. This young man had worked his way through college and through medical school. His name is Dr. Demopolous and he now lives down at the end of this street I live on. So I see him all the time, he’s retired.

“I remember coming out of the anesthesia one time [after one of the surgeries] and I was making this great anti-English speech, roarin’ and shoutin’ and waving my good arm and he thought this was great because Greece and Turkey and Britain were having rows about Cyprus at the time. So he thought this was wonderful.

CHAPTER 2: DANNY DOYLE

“After a while, people started drifting in and soon I was singing Irish ballads for Ms. Sinatra, Robert Stack, Robert Mitchum, Henry Mancini, James Coburn and God knows who else. They loved Finnegan’s Wake, and as I sat there teaching them the chorus, I suddenly thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here? I’m Danny Doyle, a coal-man’s son from the back lanes of Dublin.’ All I could do was laugh.”
– Danny Doyle

One of the greatest Irish ballad singers to ever play an Irish festival, a concert hall or a palace, Danny Doyle has captured audiences throughout the world with his songs and stories, stories often told to him by his mother and his great-grandmother, or learned in the back room of some distant pub. His great-grandmother’s bright memories of the strike and lock-out in Dublin 1913, the violent drama of the 1916 Easter Rising and the following War of Independence, 1918-1922, fascinated the young Dublin man who soaked up the tales that now make up much of his stage presentation.

Kathleen Fitzgerald Doyle and Frank Doyle, Danny’s parents, were Dublin born but with rural ancestry. Danny, born in Dublin in 1940, is one of three boys and five girls. They lived in a damp two room basement flat on Herbert Place, by the banks of the Grand Canal near Baggot Street Bridge. “A somewhat Bohemian area,” Danny says,” of whom someone wrote ‘no small area of any city anywhere has been trod by so much genius.’ Something of an exaggeration perhaps, but still, there is a great deal of truth in it.”

Renowned literary personalities and neighbors Brendan Behan (1923 – 1964) and Patrick Kavanagh (1904 – 1967), who heard the young Doyle singing in the church choir in St. Mary’s, Haddington Road, Dublin, encouraged his interest in Irish song. Behan’s appreciation was often expressed with the occasional shilling or two.

Danny avers he was fortunate to be born into an Ireland still immersed in the Irish oral tradition. This tradition had flourished since the arrival of the Celts, five hundred years before the coming of Christ. The new nation, one that had survived the centuries old attempts to subjugate it, was emerging into a dramatically changing new world and “the national radio service, Radio Eireann, did much to foster the folk tradition and celebrate the new nationhood with programming that reflected the Irish heritage and character,” said Danny, “But forty years later, this heritage would be hard to find on Irish air-waves, subsumed and almost swamped by a deluge of ‘rock & roll drivel and pop pabulum.’”

Danny is eternally grateful to the radio of his childhood, which helped him to learn of the depth and richness of Irish culture. He remembers that, “There was for me excitement in the discovery of every new song, play, poem and story.”

As a teen-ager Danny became intensely interested in folk songs. Since his early childhood he had heard much of these songs sung around his home in Dublin, from his mother and especially his great-grandmother, Bridget Fitzgerald, from Kilrush, County Clare. But now, through the songs, he developed a fierce curiosity about Irish history, for he had learned little of it while in school.

“They gave us a litany of dates, a broad overview and not much else; they served us up the big picture, never the small stories that collectively make up the whole-cloth of our past. But my curiosity for the living, breathing history, the heart-beat of the incredible characters who make up our Irish story, was found at home,” Doyle recounts.

Danny tries to bring his past and even the generation’s before that; to bring all of Irish history, to the stage. He presents a broad, meticulously researched show, so that we may understand where our ancestors came from, what made them what they were and therefore, who we are. Danny doesn’t just transport his listeners, he engulfs them. Danny strives, as Sam Ferguson, a 19th century poet says: “to link his present with his country’s past, and live anew in the knowledge of his sires.”

“I loved the songs then, as I do now, for many reasons. They are a fascinating window into the past, into the social, personal and political life of the people. They were the poor man’s newspaper and gave powerful expression to the emotional aspirations of a downtrodden people, and were a potent force in our nationalist history. They can be beautifully lyrical and musically sumptuous, often full of a wild, soft sadness. As weapons, they were as lethal as any the invader had …” – from Danny Doyle, The Classic Collection, 2003. Doyle Music. Liner Notes.

While bringing the songs to the stage, Danny also shows us much more than just singing; he brings to life the milieu, the social, political, joyous, humorous and tragic events and times in which the songs germinated – all in a way that grips the audience and takes them on an emotional time machine, right back to the days written about in the songs and poetry. Danny’s voice is enough to make you take note – here is a phenomenal singer – but the presentation of his songs and stories is like a sumptuous, endless multi-course meal, full of surprises and wonderful tastes and memorable, often humorous conversation.

CHAPTER 3: LIAM CLANCY

“ “Liam was for me. I never heard a singer as good as him, ever. He was just the best ballad singer I ever heard in my life, still is probably.” – Bob Dylan

Liam Clancy met his waiting destiny head on, at his front door, on an August day in 1955, in Carrick-on-Suir: “I answered a knock at our door on Williams Street. There stood two American women: one narrow-waisted, big bosomed, sallow, and soft-spoken, the other huge, gaudy, and loud. They were glaringly American against the drab, gray backdrop of an Irish town of the time. They looked to me like two exotic birds that had been blown off course in some storm and had come to earth in the wrong place.

“The slimmer of the two said in a soft, refined American accent, ‘Hi, my name is Diane Hamilton and this is my friend Catherine Wright. We’re in Ireland collecting folk music. This is the Clancy’s, isn’t it? We were told to come see Mammy Clancy by her sons Paddy and Tom in New York. They said she had some wonderful children’s songs.’”1

Diane Hamilton (Guggenheim), an affluent American song collector who came to Ireland to collect as many songs, lyrics and music of the Irish song tradition as she could find, became a flashpoint, mostly good, of many of the life-changing incidents in Liam Clancy’s life. She had changed her last name to hide her wealth, being the daughter of Harry Guggenheim, known as the ‘Father of American Aviation,’ as well as to give her better access to the treasure troves of songs and stories that she was seeking out, especially children’s songs, a special love of hers. She met Liam Clancy, formed a friendship and they traveled together all around Ireland, collecting these Irish ballads, mostly in their natural settings, the kitchens and parlors of farmers, tradesmen, shop keepers and their families and friends. Many neighbors would gather for impromptu sessiuns (sing-alongs), when they heard that collectors were at work nearby.

“… Dianne, with all her problems, had a very important talent: she was a catalyst. Never mind her singing or playing or collecting. That was just covered ground that others had traveled before, but she had an uncanny instinct for bringing people together whose combined energies and interests made a magical new element. She saw the potential in a situation, and she had the money to make it happen,” said Liam.1

Another fateful day soon followed later that year, when on one such excursion in search of songs, they went to visit legendary source singer and song collector, Sarah Makem, and her son, Tommy, in the Makems’ hometown of Keady, County Armagh.

As Liam tells it, “The recording sessions at the Makem’s house were memorable. Peter, the man of the house, with his pipe and fiddle…and Jack, his son…Tommy, the youngest son, in the corner nearly as shy as myself…. And they all buzzed around the queen bee herself, Sarah Makem, as she sat placid in the eye of the hurricane.

“It was so much like the Clancy household it was uncanny, in our case Mammy Clancy being the queen bee. All that was different was the accents.

“Sarah Makem has a vast store of songs which the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem would later plunder. Sean O’Boyle, too, the great musical scholar and folklorist, was a regular at the sessions. From him I got the beautiful Gaelic song “Buachaill on Eirne.” It was later ‘Englishized’ by a journalist from a Glascow newpaper and became quite famous as an Irish ‘folk song’ renamed ‘Come by the Hills.’

“The young Tommy Makem and I struck up an instant friendship. Our interests were so similar: girls, theatre and singing, in that order. He was heading to America soon, he told me, to try his luck at acting. We agreed to keep in touch.”1

Liam and Tommy hit it off, and about a year after they met, each headed for America (separately) to try their luck at acting – both on stage and on television. But the legendary Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem seeds had been planted and would blossom and multiply beyond anyone’s dreams.

Endnotes:
1 From The Mountain of the Women, Memoirs of an Irish Troubadour, By Liam Clancy. Doubleday Books, 2002.